Thursday, December 26, 2013

Aristotle is considered the greatest scientist and one of
the greatest philosophers of the ancient world. A student of Plato, Aristotle
was the teacher of Alexander the Great and the founder of the Peripatetic
school of thought. His vast writings include Metaphysics, Physics, Nichomachean
Ethics, Politics, and Poetics. Aristotle was one of the first empirical
thinkers, though he generally relied on established methods of science:
observation, collection and categorization of specimens, analysis of data, induction,
and deduction. Aristotle's mastery of the subjects he studied gained him the
reputation in subsequent centuries as an infallible guide to natural phenomena
and philosophy. After 1500 CE, in light of new discoveries by Nicholas
Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and other scientists, many of Aristotle's
theories were rejected; nevertheless, his influence on modern science is
undeniable.

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in the small town of Stagira
in Thrace, a primitive outpost of Greek culture east of Macedonia. His father
was a wealthy court physician to the kings of Macedonia, and Aristotle spent
his early years at Pella, the capital of King Amyntas III and his successor
King Philip II of Macedon. Aristotle, seeking to follow in his father's footsteps
as a scientist and physician, journeyed south to Athens in 366. He studied at
the Academy, Plato's school in Athens, where he became that philosopher's most
famous student. At the Academy, Aristotle fit in as a wealthy aristocrat, but
his Thracian and Macedonian background plagued him among condescending
Athenians. In the end, Aristotle's superior intellect silenced all criticism.

From Plato, Aristotle learned of the universal truth, which
Socrates termed "the Good." Plato taught his students at the Academy
that the best means to approach an understanding of truth was through reason,
the study of mathematics and music, intuition, and intense and deep
contemplation. Aristotle, less the mystical and more the pragmatic thinker,
broke from his teacher by adopting the scientific approach to human behavior,
natural philosophy, natural science, ethics, and metaphysics. Aristotle also
learned from Plato of being (ousia), the divine essence, from which all things
derive. Aristotle did not abandon this religious interpretation of the ultimate
reality but brought science to bear to discover and to understand it. For
Aristotle, then, science is a pious act to discover the nature of goodness,
justice, virtue, and being, and human experience is an essential matter for study,
since the better sort of human beings echo being itself.

Upon Plato's death, Aristotle left what was no doubt a
competitive situation among Plato's students, each jockeying to take the place
of the master. Aristotle journeyed to a small kingdom in Asia Minor
(present-day Turkey) where he became court philosopher to King Hermias.
Aristotle married the king's daughter but soon fled (with his wife) upon the
tragic assassination of the king. Aristotle ended up back in Macedonia in 343,
this time as tutor to the royal prince Alexander (Alexander the Great). Legend
has it that Philip II of Macedon enticed Aristotle to return to Pella, an
intellectual and cultural backwater compared to Athens, with a tempting salary
and a promise: Stagira having been destroyed and its population enslaved in one
of Philip's campaigns, Philip proposed that in return for Aristotle's services
the king would rebuild the town and bring the inhabitants out of slavery.
Aristotle agreed to the terms.

Alexander eventually became king of Macedonia in 336 upon
his father's assassination and then spent the next 13 years of his life
conquering Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and
Afghanistan—all of which made up the Persian Empire. Alexander was a warrior
and conqueror who thought himself the heroic son of the king of the gods, Zeus.
Nevertheless, Aristotle, who eschewed the life of a warrior, had been
Alexander's teacher for three years during the years from 13 to 16, and below
the surface of Alexander's actions are hints that he had adopted the life of a
philosopher and that he thought of himself as a scientist, even a physician.
Alexander, for example, composed letters to Aristotle that included samples of
plant and animal life that he had gathered for his teacher's collection.

In the meantime, Aristotle had left Macedonia for Athens,
where he opened his school, the Lyceum. The philosopher eventually broke with
Alexander over the death of Aristotle's grandnephew Callisthenes, a philosopher
and historian who accompanied Alexander's expedition. Callisthenes was
implicated in a plot to assassinate the king and was executed. Even so, the
Athenians associated Aristotle with Alexander, who was very unpopular in
Athens. Upon Alexander's death in 323, the Athenians felt free enough to throw
off the shackles imposed on them by Alexander—and one shackle was represented
by Alexander's former teacher. Aristotle was eventually forced to flee the city
and abandon his school. He died soon after, in 322 BCE.

Aristotle is perhaps best known today as a logician. He
created a system of thought based on fundamental assumptions that one cannot
doubt—the famous a priori truths. Whereas Plato believed that one must
accomplish knowledge of truth by means of reason and intuition, Aristotle
believed that the philosopher must observe particular phenomena to arrive at an
understanding of reality, a scientific technique known as induction. Once truth
is known through induction from the particular to the universal, the
philosopher can engage in the process of deduction from the basis of the
universal to arrive at other particular truths. Aristotle's system of logic is
known as syllogism.

Aristotle also made contributions in metaphysics, the study
of reality that transcends the physical world. Once again a priori truths are
the basis for metaphysical studies. Aristotle assumed that there is a First
Cause, an "unmoved mover," that he defined as actuality, in contrast
to potency, or the potential, which represents movement. Aristotle argued that
all reality can be explained according to cause and effect, act and potential.
For example, time is an actual phenomenon—it has existence as a form or
essence. Time acts upon human movement, providing a temporal context in which
humans are born, live, and die, all the while measuring their lives according
to the standard of time. Aristotle further argued in Metaphysics that one must
distinguish between art and experience. Art as essence is based on abstract
thought—what the Greeks termed the logos—whereas experience is based on a
series of particular events occurring in time. In Poetics, Aristotle argued
that poetry (art) explores universals and how things ought to be, while history
(historia) explains the particulars of human existence and how things are.
Wisdom represents the unification of art and experience.

Aristotle's treatise on natural science was Physics. Natural
science, he wrote, is concerned with physical movement from the first
principles of nature. Aristotle associated nature with the first cause. His
unmoved mover was an amorphous divine force of creation which establishes the
laws through which movement—plant, animal, and human—occurs. The four causal
determinants expressed in nature are: 1) the material substance that forms a
physical object; 2) the type or class of phenomenon (genos) to which an object
belongs; 3) the cause of change in or movement of an object; and 4) the goal or
purpose (telos) of movement.

Aristotle's categorizations had a profound impact on the
formation of a vocabulary of science. His notion of type or class is the basis
for the notion that a species in nature comprises a set genus. Aristotle's idea
of goal or purpose forms the philosophical concept of teleology, the study of
the end of natural phenomena.

In addition, Aristotle was one of the first students of the
human psyche. He wrote treatises on dreams, memory, the senses, prophecy,
sleep, and the soul. Aristotle believed that the soul is the actuality within
the potency of the body and is the unmoved mover within each individual human,
while the mind (nous) is an expression of the soul. Aristotle argued that each
human soul is part of a universal whole which is a world soul, the ultimate
actuality, and the first cause. Aristotle's study of dreams provided a rational
explanation of what the ancients often considered a supernatural phenomenon.
Aristotle argued that the only thing "divine" about a dream is that
it is part of nature, which is itself the creation of God and hence divine.
That events turn out according to one's dream is either coincidence or the
result of the subtle impact of a dream on an individual's actions.

In zoological studies, Aristotle's contributions included
the treatises Description of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of
Animals. In Parts of Animals, Aristotle noted that although animals are a less
profound area of study than the metaphysical, nevertheless it is an inquiry
accessible to anyone willing to explore natural history. Consistent with his
Platonic background, Aristotle studied animals for the sake of understanding
the whole of natural history. He assumed that the source of all good and beauty
is the same source of animal and biological phenomena and that hence even
animals mirror the divine.

In the study of ethics, Aristotle dealt with the question of
how the ultimate basis of behavior, the set of rules that establishes the Good,
can be understood according to science. Aristotle believed that the tools of
science—observation, categorization, logic,and
induction—could be brought to bear on the study of human behavior. The
scientist studies human behavior in its incredible variety of contexts to
arrive at general laws of how humans act and how they should act: how humans
act is the realm of the scientist, while how humans should act is the realm of
the philosopher. Once again, Aristotle combined science and philosophy into one
organized study. Aristotle believed that the ultimate end of human existence is
happiness, which occurs when humans conform to the Good. The Good is
accomplished when humans exercise reason in accordance with virtue. Aristotle
studied human behavior to arrive at a definition of virtue, finding that it is
an action performed for its own sake, that is, an action performed for the sake
of the Good or an action performed out of principle. Aristotle believed that
vice, the opposite of virtue, derives from actions committed for selfish
reasons or for personal motives.

The Greek philosophers before and during Aristotle's time
were the first political scientists. Aristotle's contribution, Politics,
applied his philosophical methods and assumptions to the understanding of
statecraft. He argued that the state is, as it were, the actual, while the
citizens are the potential. The latter are the parts (the particulars) that
made up the whole, or the universal body politic. Aristotle conceived of a
pluralistic society operating according to natural laws based in part on reason
and necessity, a social compact among people to promote security and serve the
needs of survival. Within this concept of the state (which represents virtue)
people move, act, and struggle for power and wealth. Aristotle argued, based on
his experience at Athens, that slavery was justified because of the inferior
intellect of slaves. Likewise, he assumed that women lacked the cognitive
abilities of males and therefore should not participate in democracy. In The
Athenian Constitution, Aristotle provided a detailed analysis of Athenian
democracy, providing details into the life and political science of the great
Athenian lawgiver Solon.

In the study of astronomy, Aristotle explored his ideas in
On the Heavens. Based on observation, Aristotle established the spherical
nature of the earth. Viewing a lunar eclipse, Aristotle detected a slight
curvature of the shadow of the earth on the moon's surface. He also observed
that the altitude of stars changes according to changes in latitude. In On the
Heavens, Aristotle concluded that the earth's circumference is 400,000 stadia
(40,000–50,000 miles, which was an overestimate of 45%). He advocated the view
that there is more water than land on the earth's surface. Much of Aristotle's
thought on astronomy, however, was erroneous, as observation with the naked eye
was insufficient for the study of the nature of the stars and planets.

Aristotle's ideas were advocated and defended for centuries
after the philosopher's death. Aristotle's disciples were known by the master's
teaching style of walking about while engaged in discussion or disputation
(from which the name "Peripatetic" derives). Theophrastus took over
the helm of the Lyceum, Aristotle's school at Athens. He organized Aristotle's
papers and writings and pursued Aristotle's theories and investigations in the
physical and metaphysical worlds. After Theophrastus's death in 287 BCE, Strato
assumed leadership of the Lyceum and the Peripatetic philosophers.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Researchers are identifying startling connections between
air pollution and decreased cognition and well-being.

That yellow haze of smog hovering over the skyline isn't
just a stain on the view. It may also leave a mark on your mind.

Researchers have known since the 1970s that high levels of
air pollution can harm both cardiovascular and respiratory health, increasing
the risk of early death from heart and lung diseases. The effect of air
pollution on cognition and mental well-being, however, has been less well
understood. Now, evidence is mounting that dirty air is bad for your brain as
well.

Over the past decade, researchers have found that high
levels of air pollution may damage children's cognitive abilities, increase
adults' risk of cognitive decline and possibly even contribute to depression.

"This should be taken seriously," says Paul Mohai,
PhD, a professor in the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources
and the Environment who has studied the link between air pollution and academic
performance in children. "I don't think the issue has gotten the
visibility it deserves."

Cognitive connections

Most research on air pollution has focused on a type of
pollutant known as fine particulate matter. These tiny particles — 1/30th the
width of a human hair — are spewed by power plants, factories, cars and trucks.
Due to its known cardiovascular effects, particulate matter is one of six
principal pollutants for which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has
established air quality standards.

It now seems likely that the harmful effects of particulate
matter go beyond vascular damage. Jennifer Weuve, MPH, ScD, an assistant
professor of internal medicine at Rush Medical College, found that older women
who had been exposed to high levels of the pollutant experienced greater
cognitive decline compared with other women their age (Archives of Internal
Medicine, 2012). Weuve's team gathered data from the Nurses' Health Study
Cognitive Cohort, a population that included more than 19,000 women across the
United States, age 70 to 81. Using the women's address history, Weuve and her
colleagues estimated their exposure to particulate matter over the previous
seven to 14 years. The researchers found that long-term exposure to high levels
of the pollution significantly worsened the women's cognitive decline, as
measured by tests of cognitive skill.

Weuve and her colleagues investigated exposure to both fine
particulate matter (the smallest particles, less than 2.5 micrometers in
diameter) and coarse particulate matter (larger particles ranging from 2.5 to
10 micrometers in size).

"The conventional wisdom is that coarse particles
aren't as important as fine particles" when it comes to human health,
Weuve says. Previous studies in animals and human cadavers had shown that the
smaller particles can more easily penetrate the body's defenses. "They can
cross from the lung to the blood and, in some cases, travel up the axon of the
olfactory nerve into the brain," she says. But Weuve's study held a
surprise. She found that exposure to both fine and coarse particulate was
associated with cognitive decline.

Weuve's results square with those of a similar study by
Melinda Power, a doctoral candidate in epidemiology and environmental health at
the Harvard School of Public Health. Power and her colleagues studied the link
between black carbon — a type of particulate matter associated with diesel
exhaust, a source of fine particles — and cognition in 680 older men in Boston
(Environmental Health Perspectives, 2011). "Black carbon is essentially
soot," Power says.

Power's team used black carbon exposure as a proxy for
measuring overall traffic-related pollution. They estimated each man's black
carbon exposure by cross-referencing their addresses with an established model
that provides daily estimates of black carbon concentrations throughout the
Boston area. Much like Weuve's results in older women, Power and colleagues
found that men exposed to high levels of black carbon had reduced cognitive
performance, equivalent to aging by about two years, as compared with men who'd
had less black carbon exposure.

But while black carbon is a convenient marker of air
pollution, it's too soon to say that it's what's causing the cognitive changes,
Power says. "The problem is there are a lot of other things associated
with traffic — noise, gases — so we can't say from this study that it's the
particulate part of the air pollution that matters."

Still, the cumulative results of these studies suggest that
air pollution deserves closer scrutiny as a risk factor for cognitive
impairment and perhaps dementia.

"Many dementias are often preceded by a long period of
cognitive decline. But we don't know very much about how to prevent or delay
dementia," Weuve says. If it turns out that air pollution does contribute
to cognitive decline and the onset of dementia, the finding could offer a
tantalizing new way to think about preventing disease. "Air pollution is
something that we can intervene on as a society at large, through technology,
regulation and policy," she says.

Young minds

Research is also finding air-pollution-related harms to
children's cognition. Shakira Franco Suglia, ScD, an assistant professor at
Boston University's School of Public Health, and colleagues followed more than
200 Boston children from birth to an average age of 10. They found that kids
exposed to greater levels of black carbon scored worse on tests of memory and
verbal and nonverbal IQ (American Journal of Epidemiology, 2008).

More recently, Frederica Perera, DrPH, at the Columbia
University Mailman School of Public Health, and colleagues followed children in
New York City from before birth to age 6 or 7. They discovered that children
who had been exposed to higher levels of urban air pollutants known as
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons while in utero were more likely to experience
attention problems and symptoms of anxiety and depression (Environmental Health
Perspectives, 2012). These widespread chemicals are a byproduct of burning
fossil fuels.

Meanwhile Mohai, at the University of Michigan, found that
Michigan public schools located in areas with the highest industrial pollution
levels had the lowest attendance rates and the greatest percentage of students
who failed to meet state testing standards, even after controlling for
socioeconomic differences and other confounding factors (Health Affairs, 2011).
What's worse, the researchers analyzed the distribution of the state's public
schools and found that nearly two-thirds were located in the more-polluted
areas of their districts. Only about half of states have environmental quality
policies for schools, Mohai says, "and those that do may not go far
enough. More attention needs to be given to this issue."

Although Michigan and Massachusetts may experience areas of
poor air quality, their pollution problems pale in comparison to those of
Mexico City, for example. In a series of studies, Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas,
MD, PhD, a neuropathologist at the University of Montana and the National
Institute of Pediatrics in Mexico City, has investigated the neurological
effects of the city's infamous smog.

In early investigations, Calderón-Garcidueñas dissected the
brains of dogs that had been exposed to air pollution of Mexico City and
compared them with the brains of dogs from a less-polluted city. She found the
Mexico City dogs' brains showed increased inflammation and pathology including
amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, clumps of proteins that serve as a
primary marker for Alzheimer's disease in humans (Toxicologic Pathology, 2003).

In follow-up research, Calderón-Garcidueñas turned her
attention to Mexico's children. In one study, she examined 55 kids from Mexico
City and 18 from the less-polluted city of Polotitlán. Magnetic resonance
imagining scans revealed that the children exposed to urban pollution were
significantly more likely to have brain inflammation and damaged tissue in the
prefrontal cortex. Neuroinflammation, Calderón-Garcidueñas explains, disrupts
the blood-brain barrier and is a key factor in many central nervous system
disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Perhaps more
troubling, though, the differences between the two groups of children weren't
just anatomical. Compared with kids from cleaner Polotitlán, the Mexico City
children scored lower on tests of memory, cognition and intelligence (Brain and
Cognition, 2008).

Brain changes

It's becoming clearer that air pollution affects the brain,
but plenty of questions remain. Randy Nelson, PhD, a professor of neuroscience
at the Ohio State University, is using mouse studies to find some answers. With
his doctoral student Laura Fonken and colleagues, he exposed mice to high
levels of fine particulate air pollution five times a week, eight hours a day,
to mimic the exposure a human commuter might receive if he or she lived in the
suburbs and worked in a smoggy city (Molecular Psychiatry, 2011). After 10
months, they found that the mice that had been exposed to polluted air took
longer to learn a maze task and made more mistakes than mice that had not
breathed in the pollution.

Nelson also found that the pollutant-exposed mice showed
signs of the rodent equivalent of depression. Mice said to express
depressive-like symptoms give up swimming more quickly in a forced swim test
and stop sipping sugar water that they normally find attractive. Both behaviors
can be reversed with antidepressants. Nelson found that mice exposed to the
polluted air scored higher on tests of depressive-like responses.

To find out more about the underlying cause of those
behavioral changes, Nelson compared the brains of mice that had been exposed to
dirty air with brains of mice that hadn't. He found a number of striking
differences. For starters, mice exposed to particulate matter had increased
levels of cytokines in the brain. (Cytokines are cell-signaling molecules that
regulate the body's inflammatory response.) That wasn't entirely surprising,
since previous studies investigating the cardiovascular effects of air
pollution on mice had found widespread bodily inflammation in mice exposed to
the pollution.

More surprisingly, Nelson also discovered physical changes
to the nerve cells in the mouse hippocampus, a region known to play a role in
spatial memory. Exposed mice had fewer spines on the tips of the neurons in
this brain region. "Those [spines] form the connections to other
cells," Nelson says. "So you have less dendritic complexity, and
that's usually correlated with a poorer memory."

The changes are alarming and surprising, he says. "I
never thought we'd actually see changes in brain structure."

Nelson's mice experienced quite high levels of pollution, on
par with those seen in places such as Mexico City and Beijing, which rank
higher on the pollution scale than U.S. cities. It's not yet clear whether the
same changes would occur in mice exposed to pollution levels more typical of
American cities. Another limitation, he notes, is that the animals in his study
were genetically identical. Nelson says he'd like to see similar studies of
wild-type mice to help tease out whether genetic differences might make some
people more or less vulnerable to the effects of pollution. "I would
suspect there are people who are wildly susceptible to this and people who are
less so, or not at all," he says.

Few studies have investigated connections between depression
and air pollution, but Nelson's wasn't the first. A study by Portuguese
researchers explored the relationship between psychological health and living
in industrial areas. They found that people who lived in areas associated with
greater levels of air pollution scored higher on tests of anxiety and
depression (Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2011).

Back in Ohio, Nelson plans to study how much — or how little
— pollution is necessary to cause changes in the brain and behavior. He's also
beginning to look at the effects of air pollution on pregnant mice and their
offspring. Though more research is needed to fully understand how dirty air
impairs the brain, he says, the picture that's emerging suggests reason for
concern.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency
reviews the scientific basis for particulate matter standards every five years
or so, and completed its last review in 2009.

To date, the EPA hasn't factored psychological research into
their standards assessments, but that could change, according to a statement
the EPA provided to the Monitor. "Additional research is necessary to
assess the impact of ambient air pollutants on central nervous system function,
such as cognitive processes, especially during critical windows of brain development.
To this end, as the number of … studies continue to increase and add to the
weight of overall evidence, future National Ambient Air Quality Standards
assessments will again assess and address the adequacy of existing
standards."

In the meantime, says Weuve, there's not much people can do
to protect themselves, short of wearing special masks, installing special
filtration systems in their homes and offices or moving to cities with less
airborne pollution. "Ultimately, we're at the mercy of policy," she
says.

The good news, Nelson says, is that the mental
and cognitive effects of air pollution are finally beginning to receive
attention from the mental health research community. "We sort of forget
about these environmental insults," says Nelson. "Maybe we
shouldn't."

Monday, December 16, 2013

Michael Pollan is the author of “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural
History of Four Meals” which was named
one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the
James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of “In Defense of Food: An
Eater’s Manifesto”, “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, “A
Place of My Own”, and “Second Nature”.

A contributing writer to the New York
Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards,
including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the
Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. His articles
have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays
and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. Pollan served for many years as
executive editor of Harper's Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of
Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Extremely wealthy people have their own set of concerns:
anxiety about their children, uncertainty over their relationships and fears of
isolation, finds research by Robert Kenny.

Most of what we think we know about people with a lot of
money comes from television, movies and beach novels — and a lot of it is
inaccurate, says Robert Kenny, EdD.

In an effort to remedy that, Kenny, a developmental
psychologist and senior advisor at the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at
Boston College, is co-leading a research project on the aspirations, dilemmas
and personal philosophies of people worth $25 million or more. Kenny and his
colleagues surveyed approximately 165 households via an anonymous online survey
and were surprised to find that while money eased many aspects of these
people's lives, it made other aspects more difficult.

Dr. Robert Kenny

The Monitor spoke to Kenny about his findings and about the
significance of his research for those of us who don't have a net worth of $25
million or more.

WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO STUDY WEALTHY FAMILIES?

We wanted to try to understand the deeper motivations of
people in high net worth households. They are rarely questioned about this, and
instead are asked whether they would like a Mercedes or a Lexus. Do they prefer
Tiffany's or Cartier? Most surveys of high net worth households are marketing
surveys to sell a product, so the questions that are asked are pretty narrow.

We decided to ask three major questions: First, we asked,
"What is the greatest aspiration for your life?" As far as we can
tell, no one has ever asked this population that question, yet there are
assumptions made about this all the time. The second major question was,
"What's your greatest aspiration for your children?" Our third
question was, "What's your greatest aspiration for the world?" After
each of the major questions we asked, "How does your money help you with
your greatest aspiration?" and, "How does your money get in the
way?"

WHAT DID YOU FIND?

People consistently said that their greatest aspiration in
life was to be a good parent — not exactly the stereotype some might expect.
When asked whether their money helps with that, they answered with all the
obvious: good schools, travel, security, varied experiences. But when we asked
how their money gets in the way, that was a payload. We received response after
response on how money is not always helpful. They mentioned very specific
concerns, such as the way their children would be treated by others and
stereotyped as rich kids or trust fund babies, they wondered if their children
would know if people really loved them or their money, whether they'd know if
their achievements were because of their own skills, knowledge and talent or
because they have a lot of money.

Some were concerned about motivation. They worried that if
their children have enough money and don't have to worry about covering the
mortgage, what will motivate them? How will they lead meaningful lives? This is
where the money might get in the way and make things confusing, not necessarily
better. Very few said they hoped their children made a lot of money, and not
many said they were going to give all the money to charity and let their kids
fend for themselves. They were, however, really interested in helping their
children figure out how they could live a meaningful life. Even though they did
not have to "make a living," they did need to make a life.

As for the respondents' aspirations for the world, they
focused, once again, on how to help the youth in the world live healthy,
meaningful and impactful lives. Their answers were consistently youth-focused:
They were concerned about being good parents, they were concerned about their
children and they were concerned about the children of the world in general. We
found that to be very interesting, and even surprising because it runs contrary
to so many of the stereotypes about this population.

WHAT HAD YOU EXPECTED TO HEAR?

One could expect that you might hear things like, "I
wanted to make a lot of money and become financially independent and be able to
do whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it." But very few said
anything like that, although they appreciated the temporal freedom. It was so
non-financially focused. I expected that when we asked them about their
greatest aspiration for their children, we'd get a lot more people saying they
wanted their children to be world leaders, but that's not what they said at
all. People said, "I'd like them to think about how to make their world a
better place." Not the world, their world — their community, their
neighborhood, their family.

WHAT MIGHT PSYCHOLOGISTS FIND MOST INTERESTING ABOUT THIS
WORK?

A net worth of $25 million or more brings temporal freedom,
spatial freedom and sometimes psychological freedom, but it's not always easy.
Eventually temporal freedom — the freedom to do anything you want — raises
dilemmas about what the best way to use all your time might be. There's also
spatial freedom: You get to build anything you want — a house, a business, a
new nonprofit — and people often get lost or befuddled with all of their
options. And you get choice. You can go to this restaurant or that one, this
resort or that one, buy this car or that one. People can get overwhelmed by all
the choices and possibilities, and the amount of freedom that they have.

Then the overwhelming question becomes: What is the best use
of my time and resources? After a while one can actually become stymied and
even dispirited. There are plenty of folks who are more than willing to make
suggestions, but it takes a lot of individual work to develop the psychological
freedom to make decisions. For most, that's not a problem because time and
money are limited, so the choices are limited. Being willing to try to
understand the challenges of having an oversupply of time and money can be
difficult for therapists.

The takeaway from all of this is that there seemed to be a
trend that said you can't buy your way out of the human condition. For example,
one survey participant told me that he'd sold his business, made a lot of money
off that and lived high for a while. He said, "You know, Bob, you can just
buy so much stuff, and when you get to the point where you can just buy so much
stuff, now what are you going to do?"

WHAT'S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS RESEARCH FOR THE VAST
MAJORITY OF US WHO AREN'T WEALTHY?

This research shows the rest of the world, who often think
that if they just made one more bonus or sold one more item or got one more
promotion, then their world and their family's world would be so much better,
that this isn't necessarily true. There's another whole level of concerns that
parents are going to have about their kids. One of those concerns is this
feeling of isolation. That's actually a No. 1 concern for families with a high
net worth — this sense of isolation — and the higher the wealth, the worse it
gets. We know this is a very powerful feeling when it comes to one's overall
sense of well-being, and these people feel very isolated because they have what
most of the world thinks they want. But just because you have money doesn't
mean you're not going to have a bad day every once in a while. But what you
often lose when you have all this money is the friendships that support you
through the difficult times.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED THROUGH YOUR YEARS OF WORKING WITH
PEOPLE WITH A HIGH NET WORTH?

I think the toughest part about both working with this
population and being in this population is that as soon as you say they have a
net worth of $25 million, someone will start playing the violin. Like,
"Oh, cry me a river, you have all this money and it's causing
problems?"

No one is saying, "Poor me, I have a lot of
money." In fact, most of them are saying, "I love having a lot of
money. But don't get me wrong, there are some downsides."

These people don't have to worry about whether they'll have
enough to make the mortgage payment, and they feel very fortunate. But it isn't
nirvana either. If their kids have access to a lot of money, and therefore a
lot of drugs, that hurts just as much as if they don't have any money and their
kids are doing drugs. It doesn't save you from any of that. It's still a parent
who has a child who is hurting.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The history of life on earth has been a history of
interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent,
the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life
have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly
time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings,
has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the
present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the
nature of his world.

During the past quarter century this power has not only
increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The
most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination
of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This
pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates
not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the
most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment,
chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in
changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium
90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to the earth in
rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn
or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human
being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on
croplands or forests or gardens lie long in the soil, entering into living
organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or
they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through
the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation,
sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells.
As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even recognize the devils
of his own creation."

It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life
that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving
and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its
surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it
supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain
rocks gave out dangerous radiation, even within the light of the sun, from
which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to
injure. Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a
balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the
modern world there is no time.

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new
situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather
than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the
background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet
of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is
now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to
which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and
silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and
carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's
inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in
nature.

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale
that is nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the
life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be
futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream;
almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United
States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily
grasped—500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required
somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.

Among them are many that are used in man's war against
nature. Since the mid-1940's over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use
in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern
vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under several thousand
different brand names.

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost
universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that
have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the
"bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the
streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the
soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects.
Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the
surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be
called "insecticides," but "biocides."

The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless
spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has
been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has
happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin's principle of
the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular
insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed—and then a
deadlier one than that. It has happened also because, for reasons to be
described later, destructive insects often undergo a “flareback”, or
resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical
war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.

Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind, by
nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the
contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible
potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and
animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material
of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time
when it will be possible to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may
easily be doing so now by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation,
bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might determine his
own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.

All this has been risked – for what? Future historians may
well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent
beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the
entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their
own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover,
for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We are told that the
enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm
production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms, despite measures to remove
acreages from production and to pay farmers not to produce, have yielded
such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying
out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the
surplus-food storage program. And is the situation helped when one branch of
the Agriculture Department tries to reduce production while another states, as
it did in 1958, “It is believed generally that reduction of crop acreage under
provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to
obtain maximum production on the land retained in crops.”

All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no
need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities,
not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that
they do not destroy us along with the insects.

The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a
train of disaster in its wake is an accompaniment of our modern way of life.
Long before the age of man, insects inhabited the earth – a group of
extraordinarily varied and adaptable beings. Over the course of time since
man’s advent, a small percentage of the more than half a million species of
insects have come into conflict with human welfare in two principal ways: as
competitors for the food supply and as carriers of human disease.

Disease-carrying insects become important where human beings
are crowded together, especially under conditions where sanitation is poor, as
in time of natural disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and
deprivation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary. It is a sobering
fact, however, as we shall presently see, that the method of massive chemical
control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very
conditions it is intended to curb.

Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few
insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture – the devotion
of immense acreage to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive
increase in specific insect population. Single-crop farming does not take
advantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an
engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the
landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes
the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within
bounds. One important natural check is limit on the amount of suitable habitat
for each species. Obviously then, an insect that lives on wheat can build up
its population to much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in
which wheat is intermingled with other crops to which the insect is not
adapted.

The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or
more ago, the towns of large areas of the United States lined their streets
with the noble elm tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened
with complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms, carried by a
beetle that would have only limited chance to build up large populations and to
spread from tree to tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly
diversified planting.

Another factor in the modern insect problem is one that must
be viewed against a background of geologic and human history: the spreading of
thousands of different kinds of organisms from their native homes to invade new
territories. This worldwide migration has been studied and graphically
described by British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology
of Invasion. During the Cretaceous Period, some hundred million years ago,
flooding seas cut many land bridges between continents and living things found
themselves confined in what Elton calls “colossal separate nature reserves.”
There, isolated from each others of their kind, they developed many new
species. When some of the land masses were joined again, about 15 million years
ago, these species began to move out into new territories – a movement that is
not only still in progress but is now receiving considerable assistance from
man.

The importation of plants in the primary agent in the modern
spread of species, for animals have almost invariably gone along with the
plants, quarantine being a comparatively recent an not completely effective
innovation. The United States Office of Plant Introduction alone has introduced
almost 200,000 species and varieties of plants from all over the world. Nearly
half of the 180 or so major insect enemies of plants in the United States are
accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as hitchhikers on
plants.

In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of
the natural enemies that kept down its members in its native land, an invading
plant or animal is able to become enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident
that our most troublesome insects are introduced species.

The invasions, both the naturally occurring and those
dependent on human assistance, are likely to continue indefinitely. Quarantine
and massive chemical campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying
time. We are faced, according to Dr. Elton, “with a life-and-death need not
just to find new technological means of suppressing this plant or that animal”;
instead we need the basic knowledge of animal populations and their relations
to their surroundings that will “promote an even balance and damp down the
explosive power of outbreaks and new invasions.”

Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do
not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our
government agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical
death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there
are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity.

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept
as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the
will or the vision to demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words of
the ecologist Paul Shepard, “idealized life with only its head out of the
water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own
environment…. Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid
surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the
noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to
live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

Yet such a world is pressed upon us. The crusade to create a
chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal
on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On
every hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise
a ruthless power. “The regulatory entomologist … function as prosecutor, judge
and jury, tax assessor and collector and sheriff to enforce their own orders,”
said Connecticut entomologist Neely Turner. The most flagrant abuses go
unchecked in both state and federal agencies.

It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must
never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent
chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant
of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to
contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their
knowledge. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be
secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by
public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their
considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.

I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals
to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil,
water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone
our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that
supports all life.

There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the
threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is
unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an
era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost
is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious
evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little
tranquilizing pills of half-truth. We urgently need an end to these false
assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is
being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The
public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it
can do so only when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean
Rostand, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”

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